There’s something voyeuristically thrilling about knowing what other people’s reading habits are. The Reader is a brief interview inspired by the Proust Questionnaire, which was itself inspired by a 19th century party game. We ask readers, writers, publishers and book-lovers everywhere (including our own staff) to answer eleven questions about the books they love, what they have been reading and their literary habits.
To celebrate the launch of our new website we’ve got a triple-whammy for you: interviews with Ashleigh Young, Pip Adam and Kirsten McDougall. Under The Rocky Outcrop Writers tour, these talented NZ authors have recently completed a writers’ tour of the North Island, showcasing their work. More information below.
ASHLEIGH YOUNG
Ashleigh Young’s first collection of poetry, Magnificent Moon, was published by Victoria University Press in 2012 and was included the Listener’s Best Books of 2012 review. Ashleigh was the winner of the 2009 Landfall Essay Competition and the recipient of the 2009 Adam Foundation Award in Creative Writing for her collection of essays. In 2013 she is editing the literary journal Hue & Cry. She blogs at eyelashroaming.com.
What are you currently reading and how did you discover the book?
I’m reading Granta 118: Exit Strategies. I loved Claire Messud’s essay The Road to Damascus in which she describes trying to return to her dying father’s Beirut. And Susan Minot’s story Thirty Girls just whacked me in the heart. I discovered Granta Magazine many years ago in a writing class with Harry Ricketts and have been working my way through all the issues ever since. Some of the most visceral and brilliant writing I’ve ever read has been in Granta.
I’m also reading Martin Edmond’s The Place of Stones and Glenn Colquhoun’s Jumping Ship and Other Essays, as I’m reviewing them for NZ Books.
Who are your favourite writers and what do you love about them?
The writers I love the most are those who have a kind of generosity of spirit, and a way of articulating human experience at the same time as pushing up against what can’t be expressed at all. They’re also writers who I think I’d like to be friends with. But it’s really hard to say who all my favourites are. Some old favourites: Alice Munro, Lorrie Moore, Richard Ford, David Foster Wallace, Ryszard Kapuscinski, Janet Frame, Emily Perkins, Damien Wilkins. Some new ones: Pip Adam, Kirsten McDougall, Emma Martin, Lawrence Patchett. Online, a favourite is Giovanni Tiso at his blog Bat, Bean, Beam.
What books are on your bedside table?
I have no bedside table! I’m a savage. Instead I have a big, unwieldy, lurching pile. At the moment the pile contains The Best American Poetry 2012; Carol Fisher Saller’s The Subversive Copy Editor; Anna Karenina; a graphic novel by Glyn Dillon called The Nao of Brown; Unholy Ghost: Writers on Depression edited by Nell Casey; Pip Adam’s Everything We Hoped For; Kirsten McDougall’s The Invisible Rider; and my Kindle is also sitting in the pile waiting to be charged up again. I’ve taken to using it as a bookmark.
What is your favourite book to film adaptation?
I can’t lie: The English Patient. It’s always been The English Patient.
What book have you re-read the most and why?
Frank O’Hara’s Collected Poems. But it’s rare for me to reread a book any more. This makes me kind of sad. When I was a kid I’d reread stuff with a fervour: E. B. White, Dodie Smith, Roald Dahl, James Herriot, and, er, Dean Koontz. I kept rereading for a while into my teens – I remember discovering short stories by Jhumpa Lahiri and Mary Gaitskill and Peter Carey, and going crazy over them. And at university I reread books a lot, especially American poets. But when I began working in a bookshop, my mind was blown by the mass of new material arriving daily, and a fear of missing out was instilled and has never left.
Who is your favourite literary character?
It’s a tie between Toad from Arnold Lobel’s Frog and Toad books, and Thomas Pynchon.
What book have you always been meaning to read but still haven’t got around to?
I have a friend who’s always telling me to read W. G. Sebald. And I want to read the Sebald, I really do. But something else always gets in the way. I just need to come to the Sebald in my own time, which may well be never. My not reading Sebald has become a problem. Whenever my friend and I talk, he’ll ask if I’ve read the Sebald. And I never have. And I always lie and say it’s at the top of the list, and I never learn to stop lying, because I really do intend to read the Sebald one day. It’s getting to the point where I feel a bit anxious about talking to him, because of the Sebald. I feel like George Costanza.
Which three writers would you have over for supper?
I would have Chaucer, Frank O’Hara, and Spalding Gray. If I could sneak a fourth one it’d be James Brown.
What would you cook them?
Something easy, like burgers. Low pressure. Maybe I’d have all the burger components at the ready so we could make our own. The important thing would be the drink. We’d have loads to drink, and maybe cigars.
How are your books shelved and organised at home?
They’re not. Most of them are still in boxes in an aircraft hangar in Blenheim, where I stored them before going overseas. The rest are mixed up on a makeshift shelf in my study. But I always make a point of putting all the poetry together. The thin volumes look lost when they’re not together.
What is your favourite literary quote?
That’s incredibly hard. I don’t think I have an all-time favourite. But you could probably pluck a line out of Beckett’s Endgame and it’d be close. Here’s Hamm:
‘Did you never have the curiosity, while I was sleeping, to take off my glasses and look at my eyes?’
ASHLEIGH LAUNCHED HER FIRST COLLECTION OF POETRY HERE AT UNITY IN 2012.
CHECK OUT A REVIEW OF THE LAUNCH HERE.
PIP ADAM
Pip Adam is a prose writer from Wellington. Her first collection of short stories Everything We Had Hoped For (Victoria University Press) won the 2011 NZSA Hubert Church Best First Book Award for Fiction. In 2012 she received an Arts Foundation New Generation Award. Her first novel I’m Working on a Building will be published in 2013 by Victoria University Press.
What are you currently reading and how did you discover the book?
Don DeLillo’s White Noise. I’m a bit obsessed at the moment with reading things written at the same time as the events taking place in them. I’ve never read DeLillo before but I recently saw and adored Chronenberg’s Cosmopolis. I loved the social comment of it. The way the global financial crisis was turned to dystopic effect. A friend of mine explained that DeLillo does this thing where he gives his best lines and ideas to his characters. The characters get to voice the profound insights not the narrator or point of view. So I had to read him. The insights in White Noise still seem so relevant today, they haven’t lost that contemporary spirit. It’s a great read.
Who are your favourite writers and what do you love about them?
A friend of mine said recently that every time I read something I say it’s the best thing I’ve ever read, and she’s right, I fall fast and deep when it comes to writers so any names now will change within a week but I really like Gary Lutz. He has this way of writing prose which ‘sounds’ logical but is actually a very clever rhetorical trick. He makes the sound of sense but when you try to explain back to yourself what happened you can’t. You just get this fleeting moment of sense as you’re reading it. Like you feel the sense of it but you can’t think the sense of it. In this way his stories are very compelling conversations about the human condition.
What books are on your bedside table?
C and Remainder by Tom McCarthy, he is another one of my obsessions at the moment, there is something profound going on with his prose and I just keep going back to it to try and untie it.
What is your favourite book to film adaptation?
I really liked Lust, Caution which Ang Lee adapted from Eileen Chang’s novella. Short books and stories make great films. Like that amazing adaptation of Alice Munro’s The Bear Came Over the Mountain. That was called Away From Her, eh?
What book have you re-read the most and why?
I tend to use prose and poetry like textbooks. Like I might say, ‘I want to write lots of people at a party, where’s my copy of The Great Gatsby?’ So I re-read haphazardly and not really for pleasure. Several books and stories haunt me though, like The Wasp Factory, which I read when I was like 20, or Frankenstein, generally it’s safe to say at any time of day or night that I am thinking about some aspect of Frankenstein, and there’s this story The Caretaker by Anthony Doerr which I often find myself reading. It’s one of the most stunning things I’ve ever read.
Who is your favourite literary character?
I often think about Michael Pemulis from Infinite Jest, I’m not sure why, it might be the yachting cap, but I also think it’s because his arc is kind of incomplete, he never feels quite contained by the book, like he might walk into the room at any time. I think the leakiness of its margins is one of the great victories of that book.
What book have you always been meaning to read but still haven’t got around to?
Um, embarrassingly, Anna Karenina and Moby Dick.
Which three writers would you have over for supper?
Roberto Bolano, Anton Chekhov and Mary Shelley.
What would you cook them?
Ethiopian Spicy Tomato Lentil Stew http://www.theppk.com/2008/10/ethiopian-spicy-tomato-lentil-stew/
How are your books shelved and organised at home?
By size. All the cook books are together.
What is your favourite literary quote?
I don’t have a literary quote to hand but I was lucky enough to go to a masterclass with Eliot Weinberger once and he said,
‘Worry about the work, don’t worry about the consequences of the work,’
and I’ve always liked that.
PIP’S WORK IS AVAILABLE IN OUR ONLINE STORE.
KIRSTEN MCDOUGALL
Kirsten McDougall’s debut novel The Invisible Rider was published in 2012. It was listed in NZ Listener’s top fiction for 2012 list, Kate De Goldi’s book of 2012 on Kim Hill’s Saturday Morning show, and no.1 on the NZ Fiction bestseller list in March 2013. (Photo © Sandy Connon)
What are you currently reading and how did you discover the book?
Bad Blood by Colm Toibin (1994). He walks to and fro the Irish Border after the Anglo-Irish Agreement. It’s fascinating. My friend Naomi lent it to me because I love Colm Toibin. Aside from the fact that the guy can write, I find his tone soothing. Maybe it’s an Irish thing.
Who are your favourite writers and what do you love about them?
This is not definitive but: Italo Calvino for his humour and surrealism, Roberto Bolano for his craziness, Geoff Cochrane for his arcane language, Hilary Mantel for her daring do, Colm Toibin see above. George Eliot, because she wrote Middlemarch.
What books are on your bedside table?
I just bought 2666 by Roberto Bolano from Unity Books. AM Homes May We Be Forgiven, Colm Toibin Bad Blood, David Lewis-Williams’ The Mind in the Cave, Graham Greene The Honorary Consul, Alison Moore The Lighthouse. There’s more. There’s always more.
What is your favourite book to film adaptation?
I really loved Orlando when I saw it years ago. I’m a Tilda Swinton fan. The recent Anna Karenina was fun, high-artiface. I’m looking forward to the new Gatsby adaptation. Humphrey Bogart was a brilliant Philip Marlowe, but they talked faster back then. I’m not fussed about the book-film debate, they’re two different beasts to me.
What book have you re-read the most and why?
In the Skin of a Lion, Michael Ondaatje. It’s a great story, fabulous characters, masterful telling. When I first read it years ago it opened my eyes to how a story could be told.
Who is your favourite literary character?
Faith from Grace Paley’s Faith stories. I wonder if she’s really Grace Paley, who seems to me to have been not only a tremendous writer but a tremendous person in the world.
What book have you always been meaning to read but still haven’t got around to?
I’ve never read anything by Salman Rushdie.
Which three writers would you have over for supper?
Grace Paley and George Eliot. I’d really love to talk to the art writer, Martin Gayford. He wrote a book called Man with a Blue Scarf about his conversations with Lucien Freud while sitting for portrait. I’d want the gossip.
What would you cook them?
David would cook. I’m a baker. If it were left to me we’d eat stinky runny unpasteurised brie and drink red wine.
How are your books shelved and organised at home?
Our bookshelves are alphabeticised and ordered into fiction and non-fiction areas of inquiry. I’m very strict about this. My study is organised by love. The ones I love the most are always in reaching distance. My study’s a pigsty.
What is your favourite literary quote?
This is a craft quote rather than a favourite line. Elizabeth Knox said it to me once and it’s the best thing a writer has ever said to me thus far. I was saying a piece of my own writing was not working, to the point where I wasn’t sure if it would ever work, and she said,
‘is it not working or is it just really hard?’
